Dairy Chitchat 4, an udder new thread.

Didn’t see this post until now hence the late reply

You know nothing about me .

Why do some of the posters on here routinely default to attacking the messenger as if that will deal with the issues raised ? There must be a belief amongst some of you that anyone calling out the obvious cruelty is an animal rights activist and should therefore be ignored.

Six foot of soil does us all in the end.

Empires never last.

I'm all for capping land per farmer. Never happen though no matter the enterprise. The day of the messing with tankers and thinking you're above it to is over now. If you don't have the storage you won't be in business. It's govs way now of reducing livestock.

All talk of leaving bps and going it without is pointless. Bord Bia and Councils and possibly epa down the line themselves with inspections that's the first thing they'll be after is storage. Eventually it possibly could be for entire housing period. If you look at it like it's their way of closing down and thining out livestock farms then you're in the correct frame of mind and are prepared and won't be surprised or caught unawares.

If derogation is scrapped, in 2025 and a farm can't access additional land/its not financially viable to rent extra acres, then any operations with huge loans for slurry infrastructure for say a 250 cow herd now been forced back down to under 150 will be paying back probably the guts of over a 1000 euro a cow plus intrest on 100 cows that can't be kept on farm anymore......

Taking out 7-15 year loans for infrastructure to be compliant for current cow numbers that likely won't be milked past 2025 is lunacy, if the department came out and laid the exact framework going forward x stocking rate allowable, x storage required per cow, and no deviation our updates made to this for a 10 year period the money would be spent on 90% of farms to remain compliant, but this yearly merry-go-round of new rules and regulations and the epa holding huge sway with their water reports they can torpedo any hopes of a new derogation for 2026 leaves us all in no man's land

1) Not everyone has a large BPS,

2) Not everywhere is eligible for ANC

3) Your 250 acre operation with a dairy + keeping all followers isn't going to be a one-man operation unless you have serious amount of investment i.e. everything possible robotic or automated. Without that you are effectively going to have to be hiring in extra labour to cover the additional work brought in by your beef side of things. You can ask any beef farmer how much profit they think they would get if they ran their operation just on hired labour.

What happened your 3 cows/Ha?

and your 100% correct. A friend is building a fairly big shed long overdue, should've done it years ago but the prices his getting for shed, concrete, labour etc are eye watering and would put you thinking.

Well interest rate hikes are there to prevent price inflation. That's the plan anyway.

That's the point I was making the other day. You won't get the fertiliser in the first place so there will be no need for topping.

It would be absolutely sickening to have to scale back to 70ish cows and the replacements having built up to where we are now over the years and knowing the land is well capable of carrying the number we’re at now.

And going forward I don’t think 70 cows would be viable as an income unless you’d a spouse working off farm.

It is completely ridiculous though the policy makers are too blind to see they are driving things towards industrial farming setups. No young person is going to go milking sub 70 cows. The layout of time and effort for the return just won’t be there.

Even in the future you would need 134 acres to carry 100 cows on paper for example that is some waste of land.

Yeah realistically you'd need 150acres. This is all very doom and gloom there's nothing to say Ireland will be down to 170Nkg in 2026.

Have been away for a few days so only catching up on this now.have a friend from a farmer background and he’s high up in the dept.he told me the amount of anti farmer feelings in there has to be seen to be believed.

it’s sad that this is where we’ve ended up but remember this the next time ur local fg /ff td or councillor comes a knocking.no point bitching about the greens as most of rural Ireland don’t have a chance to vote against these urban lunatics.

What you have outlined their is also why your comment re the big lads ramping up won't work, in america every acre can be farmed to the max and all feed produced is used up with milking cows, also usually have a huge block around the dairy where slurry is horsed out year round, it simply won't pay to take on more ground to carry cows when you can't farm it to its maximum potential to get forage to produce milk from and that's before you take into account rental prices and distances slurry will have to be carted.....

Done a full cashflow forecast here out to next March and am working of alot of rented ground for maize/silage and I reckon dropping the whole lot, halfing cow numbers and farm away on the home block is the only way to survive with current input costs versus milk price, silage and maize costs per kilo of dm are now coming in at around 25c kilo of dry matter, and land rental costs are at 225 a acre for this year the maths don't work at the above costs put in 400 plus for land rental and you'll end up broke